Crippled by connectivity?

The android OS inside my Google Nexus tablet terrifies me. I can work it to a point, but it seems to be designed by people who think in a very different way from me and that makes me feel very unsafe when using it. The result is that I only use my tablet for simple browsing of unimportant things such as news, but I don’t use it for anything important. I don’t even have my Google account logged in to it normally and that prevents me from doing quite a lot that otherwise I could.

You may think I am being overly concerned and maybe I am. Cyber-crime is high but not so high that hackers are sitting watching all your computers all day every day for the moment you drop your guard. On the other hand, automation allows computers to try very many computers frequently to see if one is open for attack and I’d rather they attacked someone else’s than mine. I also don’t leave house windows open when I go on holiday just because it is unlikely that burglars will visit my street during that time.

The problem is that there are too many apps that want you to have an account logged in before you can use them. That account often has multiple strands that allow you to buy stuff. Google’s account lets me buy apps and games or magazines on my tablet and I can’t watch youtube or access my email or go on Google+ without logging in to Google and that opens all the doors. Amazon lets me buy all sorts of things, ebay too. If you stay logged in, you can often buy stuff just by clicking a few times, you don’t have to re-enter lots of security stuff each time. That’s great except that there are links to those things in other web pages, lots of different directions by which I may approach that buying potential. Every time you install a new app, it gives you a list of 100 things it wants total authority to do for evermore. How can you possibly keep track of all those? On the good side, that streamlines life, making it easier to do anything, reducing the numbers of hoops you need to jump through to get access to something or buy something. On the bad side, it means there are far more windows and doors to check before you go out. It means you have an open window and all your money lying on the window ledge. It means there is always a suspicion that if you get a trojan or virus, it might be able to use those open logins to steal or spend your cash or your details.

When apps are standalone and you only have a couple that have spending capability, it is manageable, but when everything is interconnected so much, there are too many routes to access your cash. You cant close the main account session because so many things you want to do are linked to it and if you log out, you lose all the dependent apps. Also, without a proper keyboard, typing your fully alphanumeric passwords takes ages. Yes, you can use password managers, but that’s just another layer of security to worry about. Because I don’t ever feel confident on a highly unintuitive OS or even worse-designed apps that I know what I am doing, I want a blanket block on any spend from my tablet even while I am logged into accounts to access other stuff. I only want my tablet to be able to spend after it has warned me that it wants to, why, how much, where to, for what, and what extras there might be. Ever. I never want it to be able to spend just by me clicking on something or a friend’s kid clicking a next level button on a game.

It isn’t at all easy to navigate a lot of apps when they are written by programmers from Mars, whose idea of intuitive interface is to hide everything in the most obscure places behind the most obscure links. On a full PC, usually it’s obvious where the menus all are and what they contain. On a tablet, it is clearly a mark of programmer status to be able to hide them from anyone who hasn’t been on a user course. This is further evidenced by the number of apps that come with complaints about previous users leaving negative feedback, telling you not to moan until you’ve done this and that and another thing and basically accusing the users of being idiots. It really is quite simple. If an app is well-designed, it will be easy to use, and you won’t need to go on a user course first because it will be obvious how to work it at every menu, so there won’t be loads of customer moaning about how hard it is to do things on it. If you’re getting loads of bad user feedback, it isn’t your customers that are the idiots, it’s you.

Anyway, on my tablet, I am usually very far from sure where the menus might be that allow me to access account details or preferences or access authorizations, and when I do stumble across them, often it tells me that an account or an authorization is open, but doesn’t let me close it via that same page, leaving me to wander for ages looking elsewhere for the account details pages.

In short, obscure interfaces that give partial data and are interconnected far too much to other apps and services and preference pages and user accounts and utilities make it impossible for me to feel safe while I use a tablet logged in to any account with spending capability. If you use apps all the time you get used to them, but if you’re like me, and have zero patience, you tend to just abandon it when you find one that isn’t intuitive.

The endless pursuit of making all things connected has made all things unusable. It doesn’t take long for a pile of string to become tangled. We need to learn to do it right, and soon.

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I D Pearson BSc DSc(hc) FWAAS CITP FBCS FWIF

About me

I’m an all-round futurist/futurologist with a sound engineering foundation and over 1800 inventions. I spend most of my time writing futures material for white papers or to accompany PR campaigns, but I’ve also delivered well over 1000 conference presentations and appeared over 700 times on TV and Radio, often following writing I’ve done for PR campaigns. I’ve written hundreds of commissioned reports, press articles and seven books, most recently Society Tomorrow, Space Anchor, Total Sustainability and You Tomorrow (2nd Edn). I sometimes undertake phone or face-to-face consultancy on any aspect of the future, usually from a technology perspective, using over 30 years experience as a futurologist and engineer. I have demonstrated about 85% accuracy when looking 10-15 years ahead.

I am a Chartered Fellow of the British Computer Society and a Fellow of the World Academy for Arts and Science and the World innovation Foundation.